At What Cost? (Lk. 9:23-27; 57-62)
I’ve always been a fan of hip hop. The culture, the artistry, the fashion, you name it. Like many of the kids I grew up with, we all had our favorite rap artist or rap group. Even though I grew up in SW Louisiana, when it came to rap music, I fell in love with the East Coast. Like several of my friends at the time, I wanted to become a famous rapper. Not just any old rapper. I wanted to be like Rakim, Nas, Yasin Bey, and Wu-Tang Clan.
So, to get my start as a rapper, I would listen to a song, pause the cassette and then write a verse that matched what I just heard. After getting my verse down, I’d start the tape again and repeat until I was done. I also changed the way I spoke. Instead of speaking with a Cajun accent, I spoke as though I was from New York where my favorite rappers were from. I dressed the way they dressed and I rapped about many of the things they rapped about in their songs even though I had no idea what a lot of it meant.
I was an East Coast disciple and Rakim, Nas, Yasin Bey and Wu-Tang Clan were my teachers.
But this isn't just about rap music. We all emulate the people we admire, sometimes to our detriment.
In his book Transformational Discipleship, Eric Geiger shares a powerful example from the world of comedy.
Chris Farley was impacted by the example and influence of another famous comedian: John Belushi. In a real sense Farley was a disciple of Belushi. Farley famously admitted, "I wanted to be like him in every way." John Belushi moved from the comedy troupe, Second City, in Chicago to Saturday Night Live to starring in movies. Farley followed the same career path.
Farley's emulation did not stop there. Both Belushi and Farley struggled with obesity and had a reputation for wild living. Sadly Belushi died of a drug overdose when he was only thirty-three years old. And years later, after a night of partying, Chris Farley was found dead in his apartment from a drug overdose. He was thirty-three years old. While his mentor impacted his aspirations and his behavior, his mentor never transformed his heart.
Not all discipleship is transformational.[1]
When it comes to following Jesus, too often people treat it like social media. We tap the button that says “follow” or we click “subscribe,” we walk away and never really give that page or content another thought. In many cases, we actually forget that we followed that person or group to begin with.
We never intentionally visit that page. We only occasionally consider posts coming from the content creator.
We “snooze” posts for a few months when we get tired of what they have to say.
And quite honestly, our lives are unchanged by many of the things we follow.
This is not what Jesus meant when He spoke of discipleship.
When it comes to following Jesus, it’s not about click-bait. It’s about commitment. It’s not about a subscription; it’s about a total surrender of our lives.
Grab your Bibles and turn to Luke 9:23.
Luke 9:23–27 NKJV
23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.
24 For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.
25 For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost?
26 For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels.
27 But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who shall not taste death till they see the kingdom of God.”
Today, we have come to another point of decision-making in the Gospel of Luke. Last week, we were challenged to make up our minds about who Jesus is to us personally. Today, we will be challenged to make up our minds about how serious we are about following Him. As we’ll see in today’s scripture, there are three vital commitments tethered to a right understanding of Jesus and what is required of us should we choose to follow Him.
Desire
Last week we heard Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ of God. Although he made the right confession, as we saw from the Transfiguration, he didn’t quite have the right understanding. But the Father’s confession of who Jesus is, helped to clear things up. After Peter confessed Jesus to be the Messiah,
Luke 9:21–22 NKJV
21 [Jesus] strictly warned and commanded them to tell this to no one,
22 saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day.”
This is the first time in Luke’s record that Jesus speaks openly of His passion. A possible reason for why Jesus silences these men is because He didn’t want them to let the cat out of the bag before it was time. We know from John’s Gospel that there was a particular time at which this was to be made known to others.
John 12:23 NKJV
23 But Jesus answered them, saying, “The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified.
So Jesus tells them to keep quiet about what’s going to happen, but He also lets them in on another little secret. If you want to follow Me, it’s going to cost you greatly.
Luke 9:23 NKJV
23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.
The first requirement of discipleship under Jesus is desire. You need to want to follow Him. He will not force this life on you. He’ll invite you into it,
Matthew 11:28 NKJV
28 Come to Me...
but the desire is on you.
Now, let me just add, it’s not all on you. We must also understand the prevenient grace of the Lord which awakens us to have such a desire. Just like the bones in the valley of Ezekiel’s day (Ezek. 37), without the Lord acting on our behalf we remain dead and unresponsive.
Ephesians 2:4–5 NKJV
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
5 even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
A.W. Tozer stated that
We pursue God because, and only because, He first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.[2]
This follows the Augustinian phrase, which states,
You have created us for yourself, and our souls are restless, until they find their rest in You.[3]
Desire is tricky and honestly, desire can be deceiving.
A lot of us, especially around January 1st, have all sorts of desires. We desire to be financially stable. We desire to be physically healthier. We have a desire to grow in our walk with Jesus. But by the time February 1st rolls around, we fall off and we quickly discover that just having a desire for those things doesn’t cut it at all.
The Word of God says,
Matthew 5:6 NKJV
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled.
We need to have the same attitude the prophet Job had,
Job 23:12 NKJV
12 I have not departed from the commandment of His lips; I have treasured the words of His mouth More than my necessary food.
The thing that gives birth to this kind of desire, this kind of longing and yearning for God, is an awareness of our own inadequacy and the Lord’s sovereignty. The awareness of our own insufficiency and Yahweh’s abundance. Our own sinfulness and inability to save ourselves while looking into the face of the Holy One Who has no limitations and no needs; the God who is full of grace and truth, abounding in love and mercy and who saves to the uttermost. An honest awareness of these truths is what creates a craving for the things of God.
The psalmist said,
Psalm 42:1–2 NKJV
1 As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?
Without desire, without a hunger and thirst for the things of God, you will never make it off the starting blocks, that’s why desire is the first requirement for discipleship in the kingdom of God. Do you sincerely want to follow Jesus wherever He goes? Come! and as you come, you must let go of all that you value in this world. Your wealth, your relationships, your respect, your very life and follow Him.
Denial
The second requirement of discipleship is denial.
Luke 9:23 NKJV
23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.
As the old saying goes,
Denial, it’s not just a river in Egypt.
It is the very way of the Christian life and it is painful. At every turn it says,
Luke 5:5 NKJV
5 “Master...nevertheless at Your word I will....”
Luke 22:42 NKJV
42 saying, “Father...not My will, but Yours, be done.”
You may desire the things of God, but if you are not willing to give up what you hold dear in this world to follow Jesus, you will never do what He does, go where He goes, or become what He has died to make you. This was the problem with a few others who claimed that they wanted to follow Jesus.
Luke 9:57–62 NKJV
57 Now it happened as they journeyed on the road, that someone said to Him, “Lord, I will follow You wherever You go.”
58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”
59 Then He said to another, “Follow Me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.”
60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God.”
61 And another also said, “Lord, I will follow You, but let me first go and bid them farewell who are at my house.”
62 But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Jesus isn’t being callous or insensitive by refusing to allow them to care for their families. Instead, He’s letting them know that the kingdom of God is not about conveniences. It’s not something that we fit into our schedule when it works for us. It’s not one item on our agenda—it IS the agenda, and it is to take precedence over all that concerns our lives.
You must deny yourself in order to follow Jesus.
When Peter confessed Jesus to be God’s Messiah, Jesus informed him that He is going to suffer, He’s going to be rejected, He’s going to be killed and He is going to rise again. And then He tells the Twelve, if you desire to follow Me, this is what you are signing up for. Come suffer and die with Me and live so that you never have to die again.
For all the negative press that Thomas gets for doubting Jesus, at least he was willing to go the distance.
John 11:16 NKJV
16 Then Thomas, who is called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with Him.”
Not only are these would-be followers to deny themselves, but they are also instructed to take up their cross.
This call is often reduced down to a matter of merely surrendering our worldly preferences. “I really want to do this other thing that sounds like more fun, but I’ll do this thing God wants me to do instead.” Certainly this is a call to give up our wills and to relinquish control of our lives. It does apply to the letting go of our own natural desires to lay hold of what God has in store. But I'm also convinced that this is more than a metaphor. Jesus actually expects those who desire to follow Him to endanger themselves for the sake of Christ and His Gospel.
Here again we find the inspiration for Paul's words to the church at Philippi.
Philippians 1:29 NKJV
29 For to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake,
The apostle Peter, who confessed Jesus as Messiah, reminds us of the fact that suffering is inextricably linked to our faith in Jesus.
1 Peter 2:21 NKJV
21 For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps:
Paul, again says
Romans 8:16–17 NKJV
16 The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,
17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.
How often do we resist this part of the Christian life?
How desperately do we long to rid ourselves of suffering?
Our entire lives are spent trying to avoid the pain and discomfort and suffering that is eternally tethered to being a follower of the Man of Sorrows and the Suffering Servant?
What Jesus tells His disciples is basically this, “If I must suffer and you are following Me, then YOU must suffer as well.” However, the suffering Jesus calls us into is not the pain we feel when we lose the earthly things we cling to. It’s a different kind of suffering—one that produces glory, not grief.
If you eat healthier and exercise regularly, though you suffer in the short term, it benefits your body greatly.
If you stop impulse shopping and start saving instead of spending aimlessly, it benefits your bank account.
If you stop making excuses about why you don’t do the things God has called you to do, and instead you begin to spend time in God’s word everyday, you pray without ceasing, you begin to fast, you are sharing the hope you have in Christ with those around you, you serve and give and bless others then your spirit benefits from that.
2 Corinthians 4:17 NKJV
17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory,
This is what denying ourselves looks like and though it’s not easy, boy is it glorious! There is a cross to bear if we want the crown of life.
Listen to what Harry Boosalis says about suffering.
By partaking in such sufferings in whatever way God may allow the believer thereby partakes in the victory of Christ's Resurrection over death. This is not just some kind of ethical or juridical 'trade-off. It is the existential participation in His victory over death and corruption. His victory then becomes the believer's victory. One's own personal participation in such sufferings thus opens the way to even further participation in the life in Christ. One's own experience is to be dealt with in full consciousness of Christ's sufferings and sorrows." The sufferings encountered in the spiritual life are thus to be seen as opportunities for sharing in those of Christ. Yet sharing in His sufferings implies sharing in His glory: ".. we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him."[4]
And this is to become our everyday ambition.
Die Daily
Finally, if you desire to follow Christ, you must deny yourself. The call to follow is an invitation to suffer with Him and to live with Him, and this is to be done daily.
Luke 9:23 NKJV
23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.
If we’re honest with ourselves, the charge to take up our cross and die daily is way beyond what we are actually willing to commit to. How do I know? Well, look around, there are so many in the Body of Christ who don't die monthly for the sake of Jesus. Some barely die annually.
Now, with that in mind, are we to really believe 1) that you understand what you’ve signed up for? And if you don’t understand, but you have a desire to grow in this area, we can teach you. We can train you. The Apostles didn’t get it either, but they stayed locked in and they eventually learned and embraced what discipleship means. Or, 2) If you’re not willing to die daily to follow Jesus, should we really believe that you’re committed to the cause of Christ? That you want Him as badly as He wants you? Too many in the church are not at a place in their spiritual lives where they die daily for the sake of Christ. It’s too uncomfortable.
When was the last time following Jesus cost you anything? When was the last time that you really inconvenienced yourself for Jesus? When was the last time you willingly sacrificed yourself in order to share the Gospel with someone you knew didn’t agree with Jesus? When was the last time that you gave up something that actually caused you to suffer so that others could have the things they need?
The kingdom of God is not about earthly comforts so stop chasing them and surrender all for Jesus.
Now, for those of you who really want it, understand this, Jesus’ command to bear our cross and die daily comes wrapped in a promise of life. A promise of glory and victory. How else can I carry the symbol of torture today, completely sacrifice my life upon it and turn around to do it again tomorrow unless Christ raises me to life again? What we give up for the sake of Christ we gain yet again.
When the disciples questioned Jesus about what was the benefit of denying themselves to follow Him He said this,
Mark 10:29–30 NKJV
29 So Jesus answered and said, “Assuredly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My sake and the gospel’s,
30 who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this time—houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions—and in the age to come, eternal life.
So when Jesus told the scribe and the disciples to abandon their families and follow Him, had they done that, they would’ve lost nothing. Matthew and Mark both add these words from Jesus,
Mark 8:35–38 NKJV
35 For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.
36 For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?
37 Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
38 For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man also will be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
The counter-intuitiveness of the kingdom of God is so evident here. The more that you hold onto in this world, the more you will lose. The more you give up for the sake of Christ, the more you will gain
This cross is necessary. As the hymnwriter puts it, “There is no other way than to trust and obey.” We can’t follow a crucified Savior without a cross of our own. Some people say, “Yes, Christ is up front carrying the cross and we are to follow.” But they think Christ is up front carrying his cross while we are in a parade behind him, riding floats and waving at the crowds like the queen. We are in a parade, but it’s a long parade of men and women, boys and girls, walking—not floating—each hunched over carrying the tool of their own death. This cross-carrying is necessary.[5]
And this is to be our daily pursuit.
Respond
Here is a final word of encouragement.
Jesus invites every single one of us to come and follow Him, but as you come, understand that it’s going to cost you.
It’s going to cost you some relationships.
It’s going to cost you some time…some sleep...some money.
It may even require that you miss out on that vacation you got planned or that you push your retirement date back a few years.
A.W. Tozer once said,
The whole transaction of the religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be ‘received’ without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is ‘saved,’ but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God.[6]
So come. If you desire to follow the Suffering Servant, come and lay your life down. Get up tomorrow and do it again and keep on doing it until Christ returns to take you home.
So today, right now, I’m asking you to respond—not with feelings, not with good intentions, but with faith and obedience.
If you desire Him… come.
If you need to deny yourself… surrender.
If you need to die daily… start today.
Tre Clark
Britton Christian Church
7/30/2026
[1] (Eric Geiger, et al, Transformational Discipleship, p7).
[2] (Pursuit of God, p11)
[3] (Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1)
[4] (Harry Boosalis, Orthodox Life: According to Saint Silouan the Athonite, p91).
[5] (Thabiti Anyabwile, Exalting Jesus in Luke, Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 2018), 163.)
[6] The Pursuit of God, pp12-13
